Kapampangan/Where Are You From?

Part A: Description
In this lesson we learn how to express where you live and where you come from. We will also see a few more common phrases for introductions.

For e.g., although komustá, means both hello and how are you?, the phrase komustá na ka means more exclusively how are you?. You recognise the word ka, which stands for íka and means you. The new word na, means now.

See the translations of the following sentences:

As you see, the preposition from and in are missing, but the verb come is translated in two completely different ways, lungúb and meníbat. This is because the meaning of the preposition is included in the verb. This is a bit like if the Kapampangan language was using verbs like enter and originate, which do mean come in and come from in English, but are less popular.

On top of coming from, we want to be able to say I live in .... Live is translated makatuknáng.

Here are a number of essentials words for this lesson:

Finally, we need to talk about 2 unusual phrase formations:


 * naman is a word that has no meaning in itself, but indicates that the phrase is a response to the question. It is infrequently used, but in some expressions like and answer to Komustá? Could be Mayáp naman, which we can translate simply Good, but naman indicates that the preceding word or phrase is the answer expected, and not the start of (for e.g.) another sentence (like Mayáp a yábak).


 * taga-  is a prefix that is attached to a location (or a word that substitutes to a location, like nukarín ) and means come-from-X or is-from-X. E.g. Taga-Tarlác ku which means I am from Tarlac or I come from Tarlac.

Part B Application
Read the following conversation and try to understand it, referring to the explanations above.

In case you didn't understand every word, let us go through this conversation again step by step:

Part C: Summary
In this lesson you have learned the following words:

On top of that you now now that:


 * The pronoun is always after the verb: e.g menibat ku I come from
 * 2nd rule
 * 3rd rule

Part E: Country names
In this sections, we give you a full list of country names, so that you can look up how to say I am from ... with your own country at the end of the sentence.